The fashion designer Alexander McQueen shocked the world when he commited suicide in 2010 at the age of 40.

But a new biography of him reveals that he was not a likeable man. Selfish, cruel, promiscuous and debauched, he spent his huge fortune on drugs and hurt all those closest to him.

In 2000, he went through a “wedding” ceremony with his then partner, George Forsyth. Held in Ibiza, with a new-age “priest” and dozens of celebrity friends, it was an extravagant and ostentatious occasion. But the party afterwards was more like an orgy than a wedding. The wild debauchery and drugs reduced the luxury villa to a wreck and when the newly-weds returned from this “honeymoon” their relationship soon deteriorated.

McQueen was frequently violent to George, and neighbours often had to call the police. Fidelity was never expected on either side and within a year the romantic “marriage” had broken down.

McQueen was also deliberately cruel and hurtful to Isabella Blow, the woman who established his career. She was kind, generous and always ready to push big opportunities his way. In return he laughed at her and snubbed her. When she committed suicide in 2004, he was filled with pointless, stupid remorse. He even wore a ring containing her hair, and tried to communicate with her via a clairvoyant.

When McQueen died, of an overdose of the drugs he was so fond of, he was depressed, lonely and worried about getting old. Never good-looking, and now bald, he realized that in the cruel LGBT world he would have to pay more and more if he wanted partners. Maybe he also had HIV? People who knew him said that he refused to take any precautions with the numerous young partners he had.

It is hard to feel sorry for him. He was so emotionally stunted and twisted – but the latest biography reveals a dark secret that may explain it to some extent. He was a victim of childhood sexual abuse.

McQueen was the youngest of six children. When he was just nine or ten, his older sister Janet’s husband Terence Hulyer started sexually abusing him. Hulyer was violent, and often beat Janet up. Years later, Alexander (whose real name was Lee until Isabella changed it) talked, sometimes obliquely, about his brother-in-law’s sexual abuse to a number of close friends and boyfriends.

His friend Billyboy is convinced that the abuse shaped McQueen for the rest of his life. ‘I got the impression that he endured it for a very long time,’ he said. ‘He was not well-adjusted: he was angry, and he never had a relationship that lasted any length of time.

‘He was masochistic and insecure and unhappy, and had very low self-esteem.

‘Anna Wintour [the revered editor of U.S. Vogue] and other people would tell him endlessly how much they admired his work, but it didn’t compensate for his insecurity.’

The disturbing sexual imagery in McQueen’s shows only now begins to make a kind of sense. In his imagination, he had fused his own traumatic experiences with those of his beloved eldest sister.

He was so maladjusted that he repeatedly tried to stab one friend with a pair of dressmaking scissors.

YGB says: Homosexuality is not normal. Never believe the propaganda, It is often the product of early sexual abuse and it is a form of maladjustment that means that people are likely to harm themselves, others and society.